I open my eyes and try to place the sound. Bump. Slide-bump. Slide-bump. Slide-bump. Eleven of them and then the familiar squeak of the front door. It’s suitcases being brought outside after being dragged down the stairs by my mother, to weak to lift them and too independent to ask for help from my father. The sound begins again.

I smile like it’s Christmas morning and bolt upright, alive with anticipation. Excited feet meet carpet and I rush to my dresser where my clothes have been neatly folded for 3 days. It seems I’m in my clothes in practically one move and racing to landing I catch luggage disappearing behind a closing front door.

I spy through the front window that my mother, who had been packing the car has had to get my father after all because all the luggage wasn’t fitting right. My dad has removed what luggage was in there and now refills the trunk in a more logical configuration, making sure to glance over at my mother several times, with eyes narrowed, until he’s sure she’s seen him. I stay inside wrapped in darkness behind the piano. I don’t say anything when he returns and stomps back upstairs. He hasn’t seen me. I’m glad.

We’re going to Wildwood Crest, New Jersey, our yearly family vacation destination, except my father isn’t going with us. He never does. It’s more like our everyone-but-my father family vacation destination. I don’t know why dad doesn’t come with us or why my mother never urges him to join us. When I do ask her if dad can come she squints her eyes and asks sharply why I’m not just thankful to be going at all. She plays the guilt card like a pro and I usually drop it after that.
"You know the restaurant is open this week and your dad can’t just leave it. You know your father. Someone might try to rip him off on a food delivery." She rolls her eyes and smirks and I know I’m supposed to say something like "yah, I know" and chuckle about his paranoia but I don’t say anything or change my expression.

After an awkward silence she adds, "Besides dad is going to paint the house yellow while we’re away. I think you’ll like the colour, sort of like the yellow in your room. It will be done by the time we get back." It’s all the explanation I’m going to get. I’m relieved when she asks me to wake up my sisters.
I think about what she said and try to understand but it doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, after all it’s a chance to go on vacation, stay in a hotel, swim in a huge pool with a slide, and if we’re lucky hang out on a balcony overlooking the pool instead of the parking lot. Mostly, it’s a chance to be a real family. I’ve come to realize he’s just not supposed to join us and I’m not supposed to ask.

My mother is the one who plans our vacations and always chooses times when the restaurant is still be open. She could choose different weeks, at least that’s what dad told me. The restaurant does close for two weeks every summer. She could choose those weeks. No matter what my mother says we all secretly blame her for leaving dad out of the plan and confess to each other in conspiratorial whispers how mean it is of her.

In a little while, after we’ve finished blowing kisses to my dad from the car windows and the house is too far behind to see if he’s still watching, my sisters and I will look from one to the other silently acknowledging that it’s wrong that he’s not here.

My older sister told me it’s really because mom doesn’t want to have to sleep in the same bed as dad and that’s why he’s never invited because they’d have to sleep in the same bed. It sort of makes sense because she did make him move out of their bedroom a long time ago and now has their big bed all to herself.

All I know is that dad now sleeps in the half room, mom got their big bad and we only go on vacations with my mother.

The half-room is the one my sister and I used as a homework room after the addition was put on. There is only room for a single bed a desk and a dresser. I nicknamed it the dungeon and my sisters and I sometimes snicker that the queen has sent the king to the dungeon as punishment. We never name the crime.

I peek in sometimes to see how dreary the room looks because I’m so amazed at how different it is from when my sister and I shared it. Circles of tape once secured our art creations to the walls, leaving few empty places. When the addition was finished we moved our desks and creations in to our own rooms and no longer needed the half-room. Chipped paint, the only evidence of masterpieces once attached there. Bright yellow smiley faces still cling to spots here and there along the pink window trim. I don’t know why I feel the need to sneak a look into the dungeon or why I’d keep doing it when it always makes me sad.

Besides the bare, tortured walls dirty clothes now lie in a heap under the window where my desk once was. I’m embarrassed to see my father’s underwear lying on the top. The room smells exactly as I imagine a dungeon might smell with stale air and a sour odor like hair in need of washing. It’s dark like a dungeon, too, with only one small window that never gets direct sun because of the large trees behind the house.

The smell, the laundry: these reinforce for me that mom isn’t taking good enough care of dad and I’ve begun to assume that when they yell at each - when I climb out of bed to put my ear to the carpet, straining to catch the gist of the argument floating up through the floor boards, that the argument is probably my mom’s fault. Most mornings I come downstairs to see that my dad has slept on the couch again. Only recently have I realized he sleeps in his clothes.

Yesterday I sneaked into his room when I knew he’d be at the restaurant and began rummaging through his desk. I found this photo of my dad looking much thinner than he does now and staring contentedly out of the picture. He was sitting on top of my grandmother’s fence and the muscles on his forearms were strained, like he was trying not to fall off. He had written with thick marker in his left-handed, all capital style, "how young I look". He really did, too, like another person almost, except that it was still his face and hair and slouching shoulders.

It wasn’t the thinner physique however, that made him look like a different person. It was his eyes. They were the same intelligent, questioning eyes I recognized but they weren’t yet cynical. The light had not yet retreated from them. They still looked hopeful and alive, like he still saw it all as worthwhile. To his words I wanted to add, "and how happy".

I sneaked the picture out of the room to show my sisters and we passed it between us, studying it again and again, amazed at how much he’d changed. None of us mentioned his eyes.

Copyright © 2004 Pamela Hamilton